


Waiting

by sunshinemellow



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 10:14:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24469324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinemellow/pseuds/sunshinemellow
Summary: Kakashi waits at her door when she returns from her mission."He wouldn’t know how to tell her that paying attention to her is the most frightening and humbling thing he has ever done."
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Hatake Kakashi, Haruno Sakura/Hatake Kakashi
Comments: 13
Kudos: 93





	Waiting

He grins at her, muffled and masked, hoping his eye says something that makes her understand. He would be surprised if it did.

She stares back, eyes vacant and hollow. He sees pale black shadows wrapping around them, and her lips remain pursed, taut.

“How was your mission?” he finally asks. 

He feels the resulting silence echo between them, and he is struck again by the pain, the senseless irony of it all. And yet all he can do is stare, drinking in the fact that she is here, that she was not made into the smeared stains and mashed gunk that caked the inside of the body bags she had brought back with her team. She is here, wounded, bleeding, but she is here. 

“I wasn’t able to…” she trails off, eyes flickering between his face and the door to her apartment. In the past he would have mistaken her inability to meet his eyes as some type of shyness or embarrassment. Now he knows she just wants to stop seeing the reel of her teammates dying, over and over again. He knows how tempting it is to keep reliving it, even as you want to escape. He is convinced each flick of her eyes away from his is a relived memory of a kunai being flicked into a throat, a stomach, an eye. 

He waits for her. He knows this is hard.

“I wasn’t able to save them,” she finishes. 

The familiar feeling rises up in him, like a gag. He knew when she became ANBU she had done so because she felt that at least one of the team members should be able to heal. Most medic-nin weren’t trained for combat, but she could make the earth peel away from her knuckles. The ANBU were lucky to have her, their own earthquake. 

And yet he had watched her return from mission after mission, members of her team crusted to the plastic of a body bag or left rotting behind in haste, and her eyes haggard from the losses. He didn’t know how to explain, or how to let her know that on these missions all you could really do was survive. That it wasn’t her fault she didn’t have the time to heal when her job was to kill. 

But he was never really her teacher. He didn’t have the right or the ability to tell her these things. 

“I’m sorry,” he finally murmurs back.

She tries to crack a smile back at him. She was always the one to try and spare others from her suffering. 

“Hazard of the job,” she says, with only a hint of cynicism coloring the words. He thinks looking at her blank eyes is like an ache, something slow, something painful, something inescapable. 

Before he knows what he’s doing, his hand has reached out and curled around her cheek. She freezes, just like he does. They simply stare, waiting for the other to say something, do something. 

He knows his hand belongs in the safe and platonic area on the top of her head, on her hand, not against the soft skin of her cheek, not where he desperately wants to press his lips--

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out, his hand retracting back to his side. He realizes he is just so tired of watching her crumble down, only to have to reassemble for her next disappointment, or the next impossible expectation she puts on herself.

She just continues to stare at him, eyes rapidly tracking over his eye, over the planes of his face covered by his mask. He knows she is trying to figure him out, the brilliant mind that she is. And he’s realizing that being figured out might not be so bad, not if he got to come in and help her stitch back together the broken and cut skin on her arms and the back of her neck. 

She lifts her hand slowly, eyes careful, tentative. And she lays it against his cheekbone, fingertips brushing the corners of his eyes and his temple. Her fingers against his skin make his blood thrum to the surface. He thinks his body loves being touched by something so lethal and so gentle as her bare hand. 

“Kakashi,” she finally says. 

He wants to nod, but wouldn’t dislodge her hand from his face for anything in the world. He hopes he doesn’t ask him to explain, because he wouldn’t know how to. He wouldn’t know how to describe watching her from across the room at the gatherings their friends hold, wouldn’t know how to express how shockingly sacrilegious each inch of her face was when it turned to him in the golden lighting of the restaurants or the dying sun of the training field. He wouldn’t know how to tell her that paying attention to her is the most frightening and humbling thing he has ever done.

She smiles softly with a wry twist. He doesn’t think she fully understands it, not just yet. But her thumb brushes the tender skin under his eye. 

“You haven’t been sleeping.”

“I haven’t,” he agrees. 

She seems to think for a moment, eyes shifting back into the mask she’s learned to wear so well. 

“Would you like to come in,” she finally asks. “I need some help setting up to treat my wounds.”

They know it is a bald-faced lie, an utter absurdity, that she of all people would need any type of assistance knitting the torn pieces of her body back together. But he latches onto the lie, loves it for all the potential it holds. 

“I would like to,” he says, trying to communicate for once through the mask. He wants her to know the twist at the edge of his lips is hopeful. That he is willing to be just a little braver than normal, just a little more vulnerable. 

Her hand draws back to her side. He thinks she sees a bit of the hope, hopes he isn’t imaging seeing a small spark of it in her eyes too.

“Let’s go in, then.”

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in absolutely FOREVER. I would really appreciate any feedback you have! Thank you for reading.


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